"Cost," by Roxana Robinson

June 14, 2008|By Wendy Smith

Cost

By Roxana Robinson

Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 420 pages, $25

Loss, grief and regret are the central subjects of Roxana Robinson's harrowing new novel, which applies the writer's trademark gifts as an intelligent, sensitive analyst of family life to the darkest subject matter she has tackled to date.

The book's opening words announce the high stakes involved. "Her memory was gone," Katharine thinks as she gets ready for lunch at her daughter Julia's summer house in Maine. Admitting to herself for the first time that it's more than the usual forgetfulness of the elderly, Katharine wonders:

"Who were you if you had no past? If you existed nowhere but in this room, right now? If your life were being swept away from you?"

The horrible irony is that Katharine's grandson, Julia's younger son, Jack, voluntarily exists in that state. He's a heroin addict, happy to lose the past and the memories his grandmother struggles to retain. Those things are "like static on the radio" to Jack: "Below the static -- below everything -- was the thought of heroin, beautiful and dark, a slow wide stream like honey." The author employs her formidable skill with nuance and characterization to show Jack's addiction devastating his family like a murderous virus, attacking the cells that are already damaged.

The damage seems considerable but not mortal in the early chapters, which trace with Robinson's customary acuity the tangled skeins of affection and aggravation that form our most-intimate bonds. Julia, a moderately successful painter with a day job as a university professor, is divorced but reasonably friendly with ex-husband Wendell. Yes, he cheated on her and left her for another woman, but she had an affair, too, and isn't absolutely certain Wendell is Jack's father. She ended the affair when she found she was pregnant and never told anyone her doubts about the baby's paternity. "But Jackie was the secret reminder of her scarlet season," the turbulent, lawbreaking center of attention throughout his childhood while his dependable older brother, Steven, seethed.

In Maine, Julia is annoyed by the constant criticisms of her father, Edward, a retired neurosurgeon who "viewed the world as a student project offered up to him for correction." She long ago distanced herself from gentle, loving Katharine, concluding that to become an adult she had to escape "her mother's pain, her mother's feelings."

Nonetheless, Julia is saddened to see age taking its toll on her parents. There's no point in discussing it with her sister, Harriet, though; the once-close siblings have had a cool relationship ever since Julia failed to support Harriet when she outraged their father by choosing to become a veterinarian instead of a doctor.

These relatively ordinary stresses turn toxic after Steven arrives. A disenchanted environmental activist considering law school, he had stopped en route to Maine to visit Jack in his crummy Brooklyn apartment and quickly realized what was going on. But once he has uttered the terrible word "heroin" and Julia has begun making plans to save Jack, Steven backs away.

" [D]on't ask me to help, I'm not in on this,' " he tells her.

" 'You can't start this and then just walk away, Steven,' " Julia protests. "She felt rage flooding through her. . . . She would not tolerate Steven's mutinous response." The family breakdown has begun.

It only gets worse after Julia asks Wendell to bring Jack to Maine so they can confront him. The confrontation is a failure. Jack denies everything but is upset enough to head out after dark in a small motorboat. Steven, trying as usual to protect his brother from the consequences of his recklessness, goes along. They're lost at sea for hours, and from here events escalate with frightening speed. After they're rescued, Jack is so obviously in withdrawal that his parents call the police, who put him in the hospital. He walks out, steals a car and tries to rob a drugstore.

Just a few days after they learned of their son's addiction, Julia and Wendell find themselves talking to Ralph Carpenter, the head of a drug-rehab program. "'[O]n heroin, Jack is no one you know,'" he tells them. "'All your memories, everything you've built up to deal with him, are useless.'"

It's a nice touch that no one much likes Carpenter, the bossy and authoritative purveyor of unwelcome information. One of Robinson's most impressive achievements is to show that even in extreme situations, individual personalities come into play, and people respond in characteristic ways. Julia tries to protect Jack from Wendell's anger; Steven is, "'Sick of the whole family racing around in crisis because Jack's screwed up again.'"